One Morning Like a Bird Read Online Free Page B

you, is it?’ Her breath touches his face. He nods, then tells her – with what he hopes is an appealing listlessness – that he has been out most of the night, walking and thinking.
        ‘Out drinking on the Ginza, you mean.’
        ‘I’m not one of those,’ he says. ‘In fact, I have a lot on my mind right now.’
        This, she must know, is not unlikely (though whose mind these days does not carry its burden?). Her voice softens a little. ‘Even so,’ she says, ‘I don’t have time to talk to you now.’
        ‘You’re going to work?’ he asks, as if the idea has just occurred to him, though he could, if called on, write down her hours as accurately as any of her supervisors at the railway company. Kyoko Kitamura, reporting to Tokyo Central Station at six o’clock for the seven fifteen express to Shimonoseki. If he was to unbutton her winter coat, he would find beneath it the black dress and black stockings of her uniform. Her cap and apron – washed and starched – will be in the canvas bag over her shoulder, next, perhaps, to a lunch box, a pack of cigarettes, a magazine or two.
        ‘As we’ve run into each other,’ he says, wondering at how easily these half-lies come to him, if he should be troubled by such a facility, ‘why don’t I see you to the station? There’s no sense my trying to sleep now.’
        At first she refuses, then seeing he will not be easily shaken off, and seeing too how well the darkness covers them, she agrees he can walk her the five hundred yards to the tram-stop. He talks to her about the New Year holiday, how nice it was, how boring. He tells her he looked for her at the shrine.
        ‘We didn’t stay for long,’ she says. ‘Grandmother’s chilblains are bad this winter. The cold is painful for her. I have to bind her feet at night.’
        ‘And Mr Kitamura? Did the New Year mail get through?’
        There was, she says, a card with a printed New Year message, to which Saburo had added a line of his own.
        ‘A line? Well,’ says Yuji, ‘there can’t be much time out there for writing.’
        ‘There’s plenty of time,’ she says. ‘He’s just not the sort to write much.’ She doesn’t add ‘as you know’ or ‘you know how he is’, and again Yuji wonders what, and how much, Saburo has ever told her about the two of them. Would he have reminisced, with a bark of indulgent laughter, about his days at middle school, when it was Yuji, skinny little Yuji with no elder brother to protect him any more, who did much of his writing for him? Would he have recalled for her the fact that, though he was indeed expert at making water-bombs or cracking people over the head with a shinai, in calligraphy class he barely knew which end of the brush to hold? Has he, then, with a frown of amazement, tried to explain to her his long alliance with Yuji, a bond between two kinds of weakness, revived at the outset of each new term with a leisurely beating and certain simple though effective acts of humiliation, such as forcing open Yuji’s mouth and spitting into it. Or is it his task to explain to Kyoko that her husband – heroic young veteran of the Kwangtung Army – was, for some years, his private bully? Not, it should be said, that they ever truly hated each other, not then. On the contrary, they were drawn together by mutual loneliness, a precocious knowledge of loss (Saburo’s mother a victim of the influenza in Taisho 8, his father dead from cirrhosis of the liver the first year of Showa), so that even as one brought down his fist and the other grunted with pain, it was a type of friendship, and one that lasted, in its own mysterious fashion, until the marriage two years ago, or until that spring afternoon three weeks after the wedding when Yuji, outside Otaki’s, watched the couple returning to the old woman’s house arm in arm under the shade of a parasol, petals in Kyoko’s hair from blossom-viewing in the park, and on the